My GM shmups - Last Chance,MEGATANK, Flying V, XYX, ZPF

[BPzeBanshee]

I was at work recently and a certain 80s song played over the radio that had a really familiar tune. Sure enough I went to Fire Arrow and I figure it's whatever the original song 1234rock.mod is supposed to be based off. Any ideas as to what the track is though? It doesn't have much in the notes to go on.

[mice]

I mentioned that a few years back, I think you mean "You keep me hanging on" - Kim Wilde.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB3ImzSKRTI

[BPzeBanshee]

Yes! Thanks for that, it was bugging me something shocking the other day. I've been paying attention to this thread from the beginning and I don't remember it being brought up - guess 6 years of shmupping in Development leaves some black spots in long-term memory.

[Rozyrg]

It's kinda weird how that happens, yeah. I had accumulated tons of stuff in tracker format(s) without even realizing what their sources were. Amiga games (Lotus 3, Crystal Hammer), movies (I actually got a copyright strike for the Vangelis cover used in this), popular song covers of all kinds (I had a chiptune version of OMD's 'Enola Gay' years before I even had heard of the band.) It's even harder to pinpoint when they reference or pay tribute to stuff I'm totally unaware of. >_>

On the subject, I'm totally thinking about asking coda s3m if I can use some of his wonderful, wonderful music. Fire Arrow would be a prime candidate, too as I don't want to pay for a bassmod license and also hunt down all these guys for permission to use their songs.

[nasty_wolverine]

is Flying V dead?

[Rozyrg]

Nah, it's just at the back of the queue. Between work, family bullshit and everything else I just haven't had time for my own stuff in awhile (other than doodling porn now and then.)

If I get time to tinker with it I might post an update. It's still at the state where I'm just redoing enemies - minus bosses, I have most of the more complicated ones done. One issue is I tend to want to change stuff completely in the process.

Feel free to toss out any suggestions in the meantime, though.

[tiaoferreira]

Thanks for this honor, man!

[Rozyrg]

Sure thing. I still remember when it was Fire Dart after all.

Can't remember if I mentioned it before, but I'm working on a Blaster Master-ish thing in collaboration with a friend. Not strictly a shmup; but I plan to have some hori scrolling shooter stages at the least (think Batman RotJ for a further Sunsoft connection.) Shots for that are coming soon, along with some kind of Flying V update hopefully too.

[Rozyrg]

Very early shots:



All this is just really basic resource collecting stuff so far. The main idea of the game is having these semi-randomly generated planets with various sub stage types - this is just one of several.

[Rozyrg]

Long overdue; but I'm finally setting up an itch.io page. With the way things are going with Ouya, the marketplace might not be there by the time I get around to finish any games I was making for it, so I might as well just sell the .apks (along with the Win versions, of course.)

[Udderdude]

Is the new game Blastermaster? :3

[Rozyrg]

Nope, not at all...


It's a collaboration between me and a long time friend. The original idea behind it was all over the place (obtuse point and click adventure stuff even) and could've gone in any direction, really; but for whatever reason I fixated on something closer to BM. The main difference is there's not going to be any platformy stuff, just the main action stages (seen above), some pseudo racing bits for going between destinations and simple shooting stages a la Air Fortress.

I'm obviously cheating a bit with the graphics; but yeah, I'm definitely going for that 8-bit Sunsoft kind of aesthetic.


Also, I've been redoing/adding some cart pics since I'll probably be using them for the itch.io pages. The Blaster Master game (tentatively titled Aebro) will have a Famicom style cart most likely, though.

[Rozyrg]

Finally getting somewhat back on track - I'm prepping Megatank v2 for release on itch.io (APK version will be first), and Fire Arrow will be next, although I still need a soundtrack for it.

I really want to get back to Last Chance and Flying V. I have a ton of new ideas for Laser Carrot as well.

I've decided to pretty much gut the all modes/difficulty settings for LC and just start back from scratch, as the fps change just completely fucked them up.

[heavystylus]

Nice! I can't wait to check out your itch.io page this evening. Thanks for opting to include the .apks there as well! I'll have to see if they run on the Fire TV (if so it might be worth uploading them to Amazon?).

[Rozyrg]

Yeah, definitely report back on that, I'm genuinely curious what the issues will be on other devices. I'll give you any apk I haven't yet, of course -there's not that much on my itch.io page yet.

I was trying to get ZPF properly debugged for it too (although I intend to have it for free on the OUYA store); but I kept finding stuff that just needs to be flat out redone. Somewhat good news for the Flying V fans, though, as I realized working on that will be a way more productive avenue.

edit: speaking of FV, as soon as I log into FB for the first time in a few days, it gives me a "Your Memories" post on my feed with a screenie of the old title menu. Goddammit.

[Rozyrg]

Update! (sorta)

(Still) making stuff for Zenohell, including the Fire Arrow ship, which has matching medals and other goodies. I just wasted a good half of a week manually plotting little grids so that the medals make consistently pretty patterns when they spawn.

I also started on another faux ZX Spectrum style game (built partially from the leftovers of LCA), using some silly fake sprite tiling and other tricks. The original impetus was seeing if I could do some Master System Hokuto No Ken/Black Belt style enemy explosions, which was very much worth the effort. I kinda want to make a simplistic RPG with it (think ancient ones like Ultima 1-4); but it could really evolve into anything at this point.



It's only a bit less fudged technically compared to LCA - there's no alpha, color blending or scaling fx; but I did cheat with color and the 'tiles' are 12x12... because why not. I've also been hunting down old console/home computer sounds for it, any recommendations there would be helpful. I only have some of the more obvious Atari 2600 ones right now.

[GhostGK]

I love your game's art styles.. Really sweet..

I'm in the midst on making a side-scrolling space shooter with GM:S too..
& my focus is on game design and GML programming, so the art side has been pretty lacking to say the least..

Anyways, I'm going to be check your games out & learn what I can..
They all look great & fun to play..

[emphatic]

I just wasted a good half of a week manually plotting little grids so that the medals make consistently pretty patterns when they spawn.

Doesn't sound at all like time wasted if you ask me.

[Rozyrg]

@GhostGK Thanks! Best of luck on your projects.

@emphatic

Welllll..... yes and no. Not a waste in finally satisfying my perfectionist/control freak tendencies; but the problem could've been solved much more smartly. I had a simple algorithm for doing it originally (using concentric circles) but it would always place some out too far, others too close - which really got on my tits. I really should've just done *one* grid (opposed to 4) and have the algorithm fill up empty squares moving out from the center, something like that.

What I did was total caveman coding - the script ended up being at least 700 lines or more just to accommodate all the various permutations (which there were a lot of). It was a cool little exercise in low-tech design, though.

[emphatic]

lol, sounds like how I would code everything, If I knew how to code at all.

[tiaoferreira]

This graphic style reminds me ZX SPECTRUM!

[Rozyrg]

Bingo.

I'm really not going too far in trying to emulate the system's limitations, just having fun with the aesthetics, really. Right now, there's only that faux RPG battle screen and 'tile' tricks to make the monsters explode, disintegrate, reassemble and cycle colors in various ways.

If I'm going to take it in the direction I want, I'll need to make a legit map builder for it, though.

[Rozyrg]

Some actual shmup-related news for a change. I've been back to (re)coding enemies for Flying V, and even drew a few new ones. I recently got Sky Shark for NES, which motivated me to add some Toaplan style naval destruction.

Also, some fix they implemented regarding surfaces and screen sizing totally broke the border displays I had for non tate modes, so those are gone for now. Even though I could never settle on border art, I really did prefer that to scrunching everything into the main game window, so poo.

[BPzeBanshee]

Are you making sure you have a surface_reset_target() for every surface_set_target used? Big change iirc from old GM behaviour.

[Loris Biaggi]

I've been back to (re)coding enemies for Flying V, and even drew a few new ones

That's great! I really like your work and Flying V is a great game!

[Rozyrg]

They seem to be there. The script I have re-initializes the surface on room switches, too, so I dunno. I've even tried disabling surfaces altogether, no luck.

Basically, what's happening is it's doing that old thing where whatever the initial room size is, that's what you're stuck with. The way I did borders before was just to add what would be the empty screen space using room_set_width on the initial game load. Even with whatever glitch it had before (specifically regarding display size on varying devices), that would work; but now it's trying to jam everything into that 450x600 space.

If I just change the load room's resolution, then I'll get the same problem in reverse with tate or using no borders.


@Loris Thank you! I've been itching to get back to it for awhile.

[BPzeBanshee]

Hmm. How about surface_resize(application_surface) to adjust it to the new room size?

[Rozyrg]

That kinda works; but it has about the same effect as the old settings I had which just multiplied the surface size. Again, it still treats it like it's squashed down to only a part of the screen, so there's a bunch of extra space on the sides - which completely fucks up the screen positioning. I could tweak it some to fix that; but there's also the issue of it killing performance too (since it's blowing up something that's already 2x the size it should be.)

[Rozyrg]

Just a few random things - a midboss (one of several) from my contribution to Zenohell and half of a logo. I just wanted to run it by some more eyes, really... this is the first time in many many years I've tried to replicate non-english text.

[BPzeBanshee]

Can't wait to see those tank treads in action!